Archetype Breakdown for Pro Tour Dark Ascension

Paul JordanFriday, February 10, 2012

Way back in 2005, Chris Galvin announced the Magic: The Gathering Hall of Fame . Hard to believe it was almost seven years ago. In Hawaii this weekend, 3 of the 29 that have been elected (and 1 probable future inductee) navigated their way to the final day of competition at Pro Tour Dark Ascension from a field of 446. I'm writing this prior to that drama playing itself out, so I don't have the benefit of knowing what the winning deck is. Perhaps that is better for our chore today, though. Today, we're going to go through and see how the Standard portion of the event played out. It will be nice not to go into the analysis with a bias towards the winning deck, especially since Constructed matches only represent about two-thirds of the matches played.

Bill Stark already did the dirty work of sorting through deck registration sheets to show us what the metagame looked like. Here's a quick recap:

I consolidated the groups a little bit. There's a surprise (to me, at least) top deck with Birthing Pod variants coming ahead, the meager ten matches from WUG Aggro simply aren't enough to go by. We're going to look at White Weenie, Delver, Wolf Run, Esper, Tempered Steel and of course Birthing Pod decks as well as their variants. Please remember that this is merely a record of what happened at Pro Tour Dark Ascension. Play skill, specific card choices, and randomization all play a role in a deck's success. And these numbers have excluded mirror matches, which are by definition a 50-50 split.

White Weenie

Perhaps the oldest archetype, White Weenie has survived countless set rotations to still be viable and even dominant at times. It was a quarter of the field this weekend, in a couple of different forms.

Control, in its generic templating, didn't fare well against White Weenie. This represents the control decks of varying types that didn't quite have enough players to constitute their own grouping. White Weenie also carried a small edge against the also-popular Delver decks. Let's look a little closer there.

Further inspection reveals that the more common White-Blue version of White Weenie was just below 50-50 against White-Blue Delver but White-Green was about 7% better in the same pairing. Overall, however, the blue variant of White Weenie was at 50.15% whereas White-Green was 46.46%.

Delver decks didn't have a lot of matches against Pod, but 16-4 is a pretty strong showing and is the beginning of a convincing argument of a good matchup. Delver performed well in similarly low number of matches against Tempered Steel and really handled Esper. 51.5% isn't overwhelming but is still a solid performance against Wolf-Run. Really, the only problem is White Weenie.

Tempered Steel, Control and Esper decks all came in with impressive returns but too few matches to say anything conclusively. White Weenie, however, was not happy about facing Wolf Run decks. Delver, as we've already mentioned, was slightly favored against the Titanic decks. These decks, like most others, had some different versions floating around. Red was by far the most common, but some players had Black (a la Conley Woods from a few weeks ago at GP Orlando), White, Blue or even a Rock variant out there from Brian Eason.

White Weenie decks fueled an above average performance for Esper decks. Without that pairing, Esper decks fell to 46.9% against the field. Wolf Run and Delver decks both were well above average against Delver, though Wolf Run didn't have a lot of matches.

A mere three months ago, Team ChannelFireball took Worlds by surprise with a straight-forward, almost generic Tempered Steel deck and dominated. The deck, overall, went 70-44 (61%). The consensus was that the deck was relatively easy enough to prepare for, but nobody had prepared. It seems that the Pro Tour Players weren't about to make the same mistake twice. There wasn't a single good matchup for those small-but-sometimes-huge artifacts.

Obviously we're talking about very few matches here. My initial thought was, wow, this is an all-or-nothing deck. Wolf Run and Delver appear right next to each other in the list, but there was a 45% gap between them. So, if these rates were to hold true over more matches we'd be looking at a deck that either went 2-1 or better against a deck or 1-4 or worse. Of course, this is the real world and over a larger sample that wouldn't hold true. But it sure looks fun. As for what we can actually say, well, not much. The most matches against a single archetype was 29 against Wolf Run. General rule for any reliability in statistics is to have a sample of at least 30, and that's really not even a lot. So Wolf Run has the beginnings of a god matchup. As does White Weenie (a very good matchup, actually). And Delver has the beginnings of a matchup about as bad as the White Weenie matchup is good. But, again, small sample sizes here. Best I can say is Birthing Pod looks like it could be situated in a very interesting way in the metagame and it sure looks fun to play. Check out the video Deck Tech with BDM and Gaudenis Vidugiris for more information.

That wraps up the analysis for this Pro Tour. I'm looking forward to watching some of the coverage of the Top 8. Then I might fire up Magic Online and try some of these decks out to see how good they are (or, perhaps more importantly, how fun they are).